John Krasinski’s character Roger seems as affable and appealing as Krasinski himself at the start of  Penelope Skinner’s superficially entertaining play, but Roger quickly descends into the manosphere, becoming a full-fledged disciple of an Internet influencer who calls himself Angry Alan. Alan’s online videos and articles convince Roger he is a victim of the “Gynocracy, the female dominated political regime” that has taken over the country.

 “Angry Alan” itself descends quickly into what can most charitably be called a missed opportunity.  Scene after scene lays on the irony, exposing Roger as such a gullible fool and a hypocrite — each of his arguments so transparently false and delusional– that no actor could fully wrestle the character away from the playwright’s heavy hand.  But Krasinski does his best; his performance is at times riveting. 

Indeed, it’s hard to avoid wondering whether the owners of Off Broadway’s newly christened Studio Seaview (formerly Second Stage’s Tony Kiser Theater) picked this seven-year-old play as their inaugural production simply because, like so many recent Broadway shows, it serves as a star vehicle.

At first both playwright and performer work to make Roger seem like an ordinary Midwestern suburban Dad. He addresses us directly, in a typical suburban home,  wearing costume designer Qween Jean’s suburban Dad uniform of button-down patterned shirt and Khaki pants.  Roger sees himself as a nice guy who’s hit some bad luck. His wife divorced him, and took full custody of his son, who doesn’t much talk to him anymore; he lost his corporate job at AT&T to which he commuted in a BMW, and now works nights and weekends as a dairy manager at the local Kroger’s grocery store. This is why he is off work on a particular Monday morning, when he thinks he might exercise but instead “I fall into your average google vortex.” He watches an “uplifting video about great men throughout history” – the beginning of a marathon five hours watching Angry Alan content online. They make him feel good about himself, because nothing is his fault; it’s the system. “One of the main things Alan talks about is that in our society men aren’t allowed to be vulnerable. It’s so hard for us men to say things like: hey. I’m Roger. I’m forty five years old and I feel like I could have done so much more with my life. I feel inadequate. I feel like a failure. And until this morning, I didn’t even know that’s what I was feeling.  I thought maybe I had bowel cancer? Because I’ve also been reading a lot of medical websites?”  This is a funny line, and a revealing one – we see upfront how impressionable he is; susceptible to online rabbit holes; what a great mark he would make. And sure enough, Roger ramps up his involvement to the point that he spends money he doesn’t really have to attend Angry Alan’s Men’s Rights Conference in a hotel in Detroit.

He doesn’t really have the money because it was supposed to go to child support.  But it was worth it because of the great camaraderie at the conference and the freedom to make jokes that one would be attacked for making anywhere else in our oppressive Gynocentric Society – jokes like “Drunk women are NOT asking to be raped. They’re BEGGING to be raped.”  It doesn’t take long for us to realize that Roger isn’t, in fact, a nice person. Nearly every scene drives this home. Indeed, all the other characters – his ex-wife, his current girlfriend Courtney, his son Joe, his best friend Dave – seem to exist primarily to let us know in various and sundry ways how awful Roger is. 

All but one of the other characters don’t appear on stage. The actors are listed in the program as “cameos,” but only their faces are projected on the wall, while Roger speaks about them, and for them. Only his son Joe (Ryan Colone) appears in person, in a climactic scene that exposes the fullness of Roger’s ugliness – which might have been more shocking if almost all the previous scenes hadn’t already made this clear.

I wondered why only Joe materializes as an actual person on stage. Perhaps we are meant to understand “Angry Alan” as Roger’s manufactured world, one as flat and fake as the one online. This would explain why the design incorporate painted-in bookcases, and even painted-in men at the conference, plus two literal dummies.

When “Angry Alan” was first produced at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018, it was perhaps meant as a battlecry, or a warning. (This could help explain why there are sudden moments where the entire stage flashes red.) The play’s debut was right after #MeToo began in earnest, and one could see Skinner alerting theatergoers to a backlash resulting in the sudden popularity of the “Men’s Rights Movement.” Jordan Peterson, for example – one of the two men (the other is Andrew Tate) who are seen as leaders of the manosphere — published his “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” that same year, a best-seller that appealed to “young men who were lost,” as columnist David French recently put it.  Seven years later, the movement, French argues, has evolved in an ugly way: “…the marriage of the manosphere to Donald Trump means that too many men are doubling down on the worst versions of themselves.” 

There is surely a play that could help us make sense of this descent, in a way that Fatherland, for example, tried to elucidate the descent of an actual January 6 rioter into violent Trumpism. “Angry Alan” is too smugly secure in its viewpoint to be that play. 

Angry Alan
Studio Seaview through August 3
Running time: 85 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $99 – $249
Written by Penelope Skinner, created with Don Mackay
Directed by Sam Gold
Scenic design by dots, costume design by Qween Jean, lighting design by Isabella Byrd, sound design by Mikaal Sulaiman, video design by Tony Award nominee Lucy MacKinnon, properties by Addison Heeren
Cast: John Krasinski, (“cameos by”) Ryan Colone, Stephanie Gibson, Siddy Lion, Kelly McAndrew, Nicole Rodenburg